Sentence-level sentiment analysis (SLSA) aims to identify the overall sentiment polarity conveyed in a given sentence. The state-of-the-art performance of SLSA has been achieved by deep learning models. However, depending on the i.i.d (independent and identically distributed) assumption, the performance of these deep learning models may fall short in real scenarios, where the distributions of training and target data are almost certainly different to some extent. In this paper, we propose a supervised solution based on the non-i.i.d paradigm of gradual machine learning (GML) for SLSA. It begins with some labeled observations, and gradually labels target instances in the order of increasing hardness by iterative knowledge conveyance. It leverages labeled samples for supervised deep feature extraction, and constructs a factor graph based on the extracted features to enable gradual knowledge conveyance. Specifically, it employs a polarity classifier to detect polarity similarity between close neighbors in an embedding space, and a separate binary semantic network to extract implicit polarity relations between arbitrary instances. Our extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance on all benchmark datasets. Our work clearly demonstrates that by leveraging DNN for feature extraction, GML can easily outperform the pure DNN solutions.
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